open source marketer and community manager

A presentation on Free Software Business and ethics

I’ve put online the presentation I gave few days ago at the Executive MBA in ICT in Milano. It’s my first experiment with beyond bullets style. I liked preparing it and thanks to the CC search in Flickr it didn’t take much time. I’ve always thought that an image is better than 1000 words, so I let the images speak and impress the audience while I added my words on top.

The structure of the presentation, designed for a two hours lesson (I stayed in time, including some questions and a couple excursions for deeper explanations asked by students), follows a scheme in three acts:

setup the story: introducing the digital society we live in, show that software is everywhere, explain that who writes software has power that needs to be balanced:

develop the act: show examples of life in digital society, show how digital domain work, why it is different, what laws exist to balance powers, introduce ethics and business responsibility in the digital domain

Frame the resolution: present the vision of FSFs with programmer’s ethics (four freedoms) and work to improve the situation, with a final call for action to claim balance of powers in digital society.

Most of the slides are images, but there are few sentences in Italian. Let me know what you think, if find it inspiring at all.

I owe a lot to Roberto Galoppini, for the image of Free Software Business as a juggling act: (aren’t they all, btw?), to Lawrence Lessig (for the ebook DRM screenshots) and Renzo Davoli (for the pipe).